Our Team

Kusto Vietnam has built a team of experienced professionals who have demonstrated complementary financial and managerial skills over several economic and investment cycles in Vietnam.

Investment Team

Bolat Duisenov

CEO

Bolat is a professional investor with over fifteen years of experience in the field, including eight years of practice in Vietnam. He is a founding partner of Kusto Vietnam and manages the firm’s day-to-day activities, in addition to being responsible for setting enterprise goals and determining corporate strategy. Bolat has led over ten high-performing investments in Vietnam and has served on the board of directors of a number of privately-held and publicly-listed companies.

Prior to moving to Vietnam, he held leadership positions in the investment advising, banking and real estate development sectors in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia. Mr. Duisenov speaks English, Russian, and Kazakh, and is proficient in Vietnamese. He received his LLM degree from the Kazakh National Law Academy in 2002.

Luis Garcia

Chief Operating Officer

Luis is a senior executive with more than 20 years of experience in the fields of strategic planning, business development and mergers and acquisitions. He has developed most of his career in Latin America and Asia. He was involved in M&A transactions of more than $20 bn in building materials sector. He has redesigned and implemented strategies for global cement companies. He first joined Kusto as a planning director for the cement business in Vietnam, before that he was an executive director and founding partner of a ready mix company in Haiti.

He holds a bachelor degree in industrial engineering and a MBA from university of Texas at Austin.

Ly Phan

Chief Financial Officer

Ly works directly with the chief financial officers of Kusto Vietnam's portfolio companies to ensure high-quality financial and managerial reporting, internal controls and corporate management systems. She is also responsible for the financial side of Kusto Vietnam's fund management operations.

She joined Kusto Vietnam in 2010 as a senior investment analyst responsible for conducting industry and company screenings and due diligence, in addition to participating in deal negotiations and structuring. She has played an active role in a number of Kusto’s successful deals, both in the construction and the logistics sectors.

Prior to joining Kusto she held senior investment analyst positions at Jade River Vietnam, a USD 255 million fund, and the Investment and Development Fund in Ho Chi Minh City. Before embarking on her investment career, she was a controller at the State Bank of Vietnam.

Ly speaks English and Vietnamese. She received both an MBA from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, and an MS in Finance from ESCP, France in 2008.

Advisory Team

Professor Chin Tiong Tan

Strategy Advisor

Professor Chin Tiong Tan, of Singapore Management University, is a widely respected expert on management. He sits on many company boards and is an official adviser to Kusto. … helps Kusto to maximise the opportunities of this fast growing region

Simon Craig

Real Estate Advisor

Simon has been in Vietnam for over twenty years. He is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He has worked for the likes of Hong Kong Land (Development and Asset Management), Prudential (Fund Management) and Swire Properties (Development) in Vietnam as well as with Refico (Development Director), one of the premier Vietnamese Real Estate Developers.

Operating Team

Nguyen Ba Duong

Mr. Duong is a decisive, straightforward and visionary person, who always values credibility and focus in business. Mr. Duong graduated from the Kiev University of Construction in Ukraine in 1984 and began his career shortly thereafter.

With more than 30 years of experience in the management of construction enterprises, he has successfully trained and developed his staff into a team of professionals who possess not only superior knowledge but also skills in the management of people and large organisations.

Trung Dung

Trung was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the United States in 1984. While in the United States, he received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts and his postgraduate degree in Computer Science.

Trung then began a successful technology career, establishing the OnDisplay Corporation, a software development company, which went public in 1999 before it was sold to Vignette Corporation in 2000 for US$1.8 billion. Prior to working at OnDisplay, Trung was a senior engineer at Open Market, one of the first developers of e-commerce software.

Trung returned to Vietnam in 2007 to leverage these skills and found iCare Benefits, initially ICare worked as an e-payments company, but under his leadership it has evolved and grown into one of Vietnam’s leading diversified retail platforms.

Rao Panidapu

Rao is a senior executive with more than fifteen experience across multiple industries, functions and geographies and business life cycles. Prior to joining Kusto Group, as an external advisor, Rao advised the Chief Executives of global corporations like General Electric, Dow Chemicals, Lufthansa, Agility Logistics, Nokia, Sun Microsystems etc. on corporate strategy and business strategies.

Having started his career as an Engineer at Indian Oil, Rao moved on to become a management consultant with McKinsey after an MBA at Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany.

Nguyen Nam Thang

Giám đốc Đầu tư

Thang is a senior executive with more than twenty years of across industry experience including food, automotive, and construction across Russia and Vietnam. Before joining Kusto group he was responsible for Masan Group business in Russia.